cess at
work,--rents falling, pitiful attempts of the landlords to prevent their
houses from turning into maisonnettes and boarding houses, to prevent
the general decay. But they are beaten. The vast Victorian houses within
three miles of Charing Cross are, one by one, being cut up into flats;
in the unfashionable districts they are being used for tenements; and
there are splendid old houses in the neighborhood of Bloomsbury, where
in the day of Dickens lived the fashionables, which now house half a
dozen workingclass families and their lodgers. There is one of these old
glories near Lamb's Conduit Street, where a Polish furrier and his six
unwashed assistants work under a ceiling sown with sprawling nymphs,
while melancholic and chipped golden lions' heads look down from either
side of a once splendid Georgian mantelpiece. It is very reactionary of
me, I am afraid, but I cannot help feeling it a pity that this old
house, where would suitably walk the ghost of Brinsley Sheridan, must be
one of the eggs broken to make the omelette of the future.

But these old houses must go. Why should one preserve an old house? One
does not preserve one's old boots. The old houses have been seized by
the current of revolt against the home; they have mostly become boarding
and apartment houses. This is not only because their owners do not know
what to do with them; one does not run a boarding house unless it pays,
and so evidently there has been a growing demand for the boarding house.
Boarding houses fail, but for every one that fails two rise up, and
there is hardly a street in London that has not its boarding house, or
at least its apartment house. There are several in Park Lane itself;
there is even one whose lodgers may look into the gardens of Buckingham
Palace. I do not know how many boarding houses there are in London, for
no statistics distinguish properly between the boarding house, the
apartment house, the private hotel, the hotel, and the tavern. But,
evidently, the increase is continuous, and part of the explanation is to
be found elsewhere than in the traveler. Of course, the traveler has
enormously increased, but he alone cannot account for the scores of
thousands of people who pass their years in apartment and boarding
houses. They live there for various reasons--because they cling to the
old family idea and think to find "a home from home"; because they
cannot afford to run separate establishments; and very many because